


Oats in the Water

by drunktuesdays



Series: tumblr fics [7]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Scarecrows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-03-17 16:48:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3536825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drunktuesdays/pseuds/drunktuesdays
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek, you know, the farmer?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> do not read this.

Derek throws the men out of his house.  He does it rudely, unceremoniously, in a way his mother would have been angry at him over.

She would have found a way to talk to them, to smile at them in her way, lean in, and somehow, somehow they would have left convinced that the condos were a bad idea and that the Hale farm had to be preserved forever.

Derek doesn’t do that though, doesn’t even hear them out.  He tells them to leave his goddamn house, and he shakes for an hour after, shakes knowing how much he’d disappointed his family, how he’s going to lose the last thing he has of them.  

He goes back out to the fields, eventually, because daylight isn’t to be wasted, and there’s still the whole back plot to seed.  He’s planting the crops his family planted, and his grandparents before him, and their grandparents before them.  He lays down the seeds of the werewolf plants, plants to control the change, plants to heal, plants for traditions. He cups soil over them in a neat pile, just to protect the fragile little seedlings, and then moves on.  There is always more to do.  

The men weigh heavily on his mind.  They’ll be back, he knows, this time without pretty papers tempting him with generous offers he can’t be swayed with.  They’ll come back with threats instead, manipulations to force him off this land and he finds himself moving angrily, jerkily, twisted up with rage and disappointment.  

When he finishes, he lingers as he always does, over the tall scarecrow that guards over his fields.  It’s a goofy looking thing, hardly enough to frighten any sort of bird but it’s hung here as long as he can remember and he likes it, inexplicably.  

"You see those men come back," he tells it, "scare em off like a bunch of crows."  

The scarecrow winks at him, or rather, the sun glances off the amber marbles some Hale had sewn in for eyes.  He snorts at himself for resorting to speaking to men of straw, and heads inside.  

He hasn’t gone to town for food in a few weeks and his cubboards show it.  All he has is a small packet of ramen, and he heats it over his gas stove, carefully pouring it into a cracked little bowl.   He sits at his old, worn kitchen table with seats enough for eight, and eats it, slowly and mechanically.  

He goes up to his bedroom then, and curls up under the cool linen sheets to read until finally his eyelids droop into sleep, letting another day pass him by and giving him space before he’s forced to face the next one.  

"Any visitors today?" he asks the scarecrow when he goes out to the fields the next morning.  "Bet the sight of you scared them right off."

 _Haha,_  he thinks the scarecrow would say, his impish little drawn on face lending itself easily to imagined sarcasm.  _Good joke, you could go into stand-up with an act like that._

He snorts at his own foolishness and gets to work, attacking the weeds in the far left field, the work tiring and satisfying.  He’s thirsty after a bit, and meanders back toward the scarecrow, under which he’s stashed a jug of water, kept cool in the shade the Scarecrow’s form makes.   

"Can’t keep calling you Scarecrow," Derek tells him, after he’s slaked his thirst.   He studies the smiling face, the plaid shirt and ripped up jeans, circles him, trying to pick out the best name.   He sees something sticking out of the pocket, a fragment of paper that just reads  _Stiles._ He thinks maybe the author meant to write Styles, and mispelled but oddly enough, he thinks it suits him. 

"Stiles the Scarecrow," he announces, and gets a blank smile in return.  

The men do come back, like Derek knew they would.  Only this time, they have a woman with them, a cruel, sharp woman Derek instantly mistrusts.

"Deucalion wants to be reasonable," the man, Ennis, says. "Provided you’re willing to reason with him."

"I’m not," Derek growls.  "Tell him to build his eyesores somewhere else."

"He wants yours," the woman says, almost singsong.   She smiles at Derek, and Derek bristles, throws them out once again.  

"I can’t let it go," he tells Stiles later. "This stupid farm, it’s all I have of them."   He swallows hard, and rests his chin on his knees and watches the sunset, his back pressed hard against the comforting weight of Stiles’s beam.  Stiles’s straw rustles comfortingly, and Derek sighs and inexplicably, feels better.

"What do you have here that’s so worth protecting," Kali asks him, on the next visit.  "You have no one, no friends, and your little farm makes nothing, barely subsists.  Poor sad, stubborn, Derek Hale," and she laughs as Derek throws them out for the third time.  

Her words echo though, rattle around in his chest.  The wallpaper in his mother’s sitting room is peeling, and he looks around at the dust, grim like it never was when she was alive, before Kate and everything she took.  

He eats his ramen, the noodles like cardboard in his mouth.   Poor, sad, pathetic, lonely Derek Hale, he thinks and when he gets up, it’s to fetch his father’s scotch.  

It’s treated for wolves, brewed here, with one of the Hale family’s strain of wolfsbane.  His mother had wanted to stop selling it at one point, but his dad had laughed, said “everyone wants to get away sometime, even wolves.”

Tonight, Derek wants to get away, far away.   He drinks and drinks until he gets restless, stumbles outside to see the moon.   He sees Stiles in the distance and heads toward him, lurching unsteadily until he topples forward to land at Stiles’s feet.  

The weight of the impact makes the beam shudder and suddenly Stiles is in his arms, limbs askew and straw tickling him everywhere.  ”Hello,” he says seriously.  ”Thank you for coming out tonight.”

Stiles’s face is still goofy, mischievous, but Derek sees a kindness in it, somehow, and he buries his face in the scarecrow’s neck, breathing in the scents of his farm, of nature, of Stiles.   The wind blows over them, making one of Stiles’s inert arms fly up in the air before landing on his shoulder, in an imitation of a hug.  

Derek shudders.  It’s foolish, he knows, to lie here with this bag of straw.  But he’s so lonely and touch-starved that he lets himself pretend anyway, pretends someone’s hand is cupping his neck, someone’s weight has settled on his lap.  He revels in it, and in his drunken mess, he falls asleep like that, tucked in Stiles’s embrace.

He wakes again, startled by the sounds of an owl hooting close by.  He’s more sober now, conscious of the rocks under him and the cool night air on his skin.  He shifts, intending to lay Stiles down, reattach him to his post in the morning, but Stiles’s rump skates over his groin as he does and it makes him groan.  

This is crossing a line, he knows.  Talking to what essentially can be categorized as a doll is foolish, worrisome.   Getting pleasure from it makes him another sort of loser, the sort that orders blowup figures from the backs of porn magazines.   Derek’s not that pathetic.

Except he is, because he’s alone and still a little drunk and wanting so much for someone to be there with, someone to share his burdens.  He rocks up tentatively again and hisses at the pleasure of Stiles’s plump, straw filled bottom.  

He keeps a rhythm like that for a bit, simple, teasing, but eventually it’s not enough, and he takes himself in hand, imagines someone else doing this for him, someone else’s hand on him.   He keeps one hand on Stiles’s thigh and squeezes when he comes, splashing over his hand.  

"Party foul," he mumbles, wiping his come from where it landed on Stiles’s pants.  "I’ll get that tomorrow."

He’s tired again, suddenly, and he sinks back, naps again until the warm light of sunset wakes him, the sound of a rooster announcing the day.  

The scarecrow is gone, the weight lifted off him, and instead there’s a freckled kid with a goofy face sitting across from him, staring.  

"I’m not real sure I want to know why you fulfilled the terms of my curse," he says.   "But I’m so glad you did that I’m not even going to ask any questions.   If I had to hang up there another decade, I think I was gonna lose it."

"Curse?" Derek says, dumbly. 

"Yeah," Stiles says.  "Don’t ever piss off a fairy on May Day, they’re so goddamn touchey about their stupid garlands."   He stands, crackling his knuckles.  "Also, you  _totally_ don’t have to sell your farm.  That farmhouse has got to be elligible as a historic site, so fuck those guys.  Also, have you considered putting your business on the internet?  Because I didn’t even know you existed before I ended up here, and honestly I think you’ve got a market.”   He grins at Derek, goofy and happy.  ”First,” he says.  ”We both need showers because we smell like the inside of a feedbag.”   He holds out a hand to help Derek up, and Derek takes it.  Stiles’s grasp is firm, his fingers long and smooth.  

"We could share," Stiles says, smirking.  "If you still had interest.   I won’t judge you if it was just the straw thing.  I can maybe take some with us."

"You’re an idiot," Derek says, and leads the way.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm torn between begging you for more, tell me how Derek saves his farm, raises the Hale name back to its old glory and for how Stiles runs those condo-people into the ground with his words, and curling up in a corner to question my life choices.

Stiles doesn’t sleep the first week.  After they stumble out of Derek’s ancient shower, Stiles pulls on random things from Derek’s closet.  Derek eyes him, standing there in Derek’s sweater and soft sleep pants and tries not to preen. 

"I’m serious about this place being a site of historical significance," Stiles says. "How long has it been here, hundreds of years?"

Derek looks around at the sloping ceilings, the uneven wooden floor.  ”A few hundred,” he says, shrugging.

"We’re going to have to hit up the library," Stiles says, eyes flashing in excitement.  "I have an idea, but I gotta back my stuff up, you know?"

"it’s three in the morning," Derek says, helpless.  It’s three in the morning, and he’s not entirely sure this is real, that he isn’t going to wake up again, this time on the hard ground of his fields, straw poking into his skin.  

This does stymie Stiles a little, and he sighs like the weight of the world is against him.

Derek goes to sleep instead, his hangover creeping in on the edges of his consciousness, and the knowledge that dawn is a scant few hours away.   Stiles settles next to him, a book in his hand, and Derek sleeps, sounder than he thinks he maybe ever has.  

When he wakes, Stiles is gone.  He has a moment to panic, but then he hears someone moving in his kitchen.  When he pads closer, he sniffs, and is assaulted by the smell of something burning, charred.

Stiles is at the kitchen stove, blowing on a blackened lump in a frying pan. “Oh you’re up,” Stiles says brightly.  ”I made pancakes!” and he gestures to the stack of coal-like objects all ready for him on a plate.

Derek eats every single bite, and praises Stiles all the way.

It goes like that, for awhile.  Stiles bounces off walls, jumps from task to task, gets in Derek’s way.   Derek tries to adjust, makes room for Stiles, who seems to take up as much space as twenty men.

"Condo people thwarted," Stiles says smugly, brandishing a stack of papers at Derek.  "No matter what, the Hale Farmhouse is to be preserved until forever, motherfuckers."

Derek’s relieved, he is.  He’s glad to have someone at his back, sharing his burden, on his side.  But he also knows that Stiles has been up for two straight days working at this, that Stiles has done nothing more than catnap, falling into a doze against his own will before he wakes and jumps to his feet.

"Thank you," he says, and takes Stiles’s wrist in his hand, and tugs.  He leads Stiles upstairs, refusing to answer any of Stiles’s questions, protests.   He pushes Stiles down into his bed—their bed, and settles next to him, curling around him, fitting Stiles into the curve of his body.   "It’s time for sleep now," he says, and yawns.  Today, he had harvested, a tiresome practice that had to be done with little assistance, almost entirely by hand.

Stiles goes rigid.  ”I slept enough,” he hisses, and thrashes in Derek’s grip.  ”I slept for years, and I don’t need—I’m not going to—” and he digs his nails into Derek’s arm.

Derek lets him, doesn’t loosen his hold.  There are purple bruises under Stiles’s eyes and a shake to Stiles’s hands, a glazed look that comes over him sometimes.  ”You do,” he says quietly.  ”You have to.”

Stiles sags against him, defeated.  ”I’m afraid,” he says, almost a whisper.   “I’m afraid that if I sleep, I’ll find myself back in the fields, hazy and trapped and waiting.”  

Derek tightens his grip, as if he could stop it from happening by force.  ”It won’t happen,” he tells Stiles firmly. “You won’t turn back.”

"How do you know?" Stiles says, and he presses against Derek’s hold again, this time only to twist and face him.  

"Because I need you here," Derek says, simply and they kiss, tender, sweet, full of promise.

"Do it again," Stiles breathes out. "Break it again, just like the first time."

Derek knows what he means, and he doesn’t hesitate to draw himself out, stroking himself to hardness.  But this time, he reaches for Stiles too, strokes them together.  Stiles is warm, soft, making little noises with every pass, and Derek can’t imagine him as straw anymore, can’t even picture what his before life was like.   Derek comes first, streaking Stiles’s belly with his claim, but Stiles marks him too, making him messy as he sighs out his released and Derek rubs it in, rubs it into both of them, mixing it together, Derek and Stiles, alive.  

Stiles sleeps.  And when he wakes up, Derek is making breakfast, fluffy omelets with fresh vegetables diced in and hot coffee waiting at Stiles’s place at the table.  

"Good morning," Stiles says, kissing him lightly.

And it is.  


End file.
